Found's Shocking Cliffhanger Plot Twist Will Test the Limits of Its Characters

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Found, Season 1, Episode 1, "Pilot." Read at your own risk!]

How's that for a plot twist?! In the final minutes of Found, the new NBC procedural drama about a crisis management firm specializing in the search for missing persons from marginalized communities, viewers discovered that protagonist Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton), a public relations specialist who survived a year held captive against her will herself, has been hiding a chilling secret of her own: She's got her childhood kidnapper, Hugh Evans aka Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), locked up in her unfinished basement, and she's been using him to help crack each case.

"Gabi is someone who went through this life-changing, traumatic experience and realized that outside of maybe her father, the rest of the world didn't seem to notice she was gone," creator and showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll tells TV Guide. "She survived that, dedicated her life to this [cause], and then found herself presented with a set of circumstances that led her to confronting her kidnapper. There are reasons, around the timeline of when she re-encountered Sir as an adult, [why] he has ended up in her basement."

"To me, continuing to tell the story of that year she spent in captivity with Sir in the past as well as telling their story in the present, as Gabi is trying to make such a positive difference in the world, is integral to the discussions around mental health," Carroll adds. "What happens when healing goes right? What happens when healing has not completed or goes wrong? Gabi, to me, is not irredeemable. She is someone who still needs help, and we're rooting for her to get it because she is better than her mistakes."

Below, Carroll — who also serves as the showrunner of All American and its spinoff, All American: Homecoming, which have both been renewed at The CW — breaks down the soapy plot twists of her latest drama series and previews what lies ahead in the 13-episode first season.

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There's something really dark and twisted about Gabi and Sir's dynamic because even after all these years, they're really the only people who are able to push each other's buttons and get under each other's skin. There's a part of Gabi that insists she is nothing like Sir, but you can certainly make the case that there are a lot of parallels in the way they've treated each other as both the captor and the captive. How would you characterize their dynamic in both the past and present timelines?

Nkechi Okoro Carroll: Sir was so mesmerized by both Gabi's brilliance as a teen and also the potential he saw in her, and he justified the kidnapping in his mind because [he thought] no one could know what was better for her than him. In his distorted way, he was like, "I'm doing this for her, to make the best version of her." You now have Gabi who is superbly brilliant at what she does without Sir's help. But when people are missing, time is of the essence, especially when it feels like all the resources aren't being thrown at the cases of people from underrepresented communities.

She's in this very troublesome situation with Sir now as an adult. Clearly, she's committed a crime — kidnapping is a felony! Every day she spends with Sir in captivity and using him is a day that she's unraveling everything she did to try and get whole again. But to her, all of that is worth it if it means she gets to save someone, if it means she gets to restore someone's life. For Gabi, there are no lines. There is no distance that is too far to save a life, and that is how she justifies everything she's done.

It's such an interesting power dynamic because you're never quite sure who's in control. Yes, Gabi has kidnapped Sir, but is he still in control in some way because he has shaped so many of her idiosyncrasies? Or is she the one that's legitimately in power because she is keeping him in this basement and making him succumb to her will in terms of helping her with these cases?

We will see that back and forth across the whole series; we'll especially see that across this season as Gabi starts to heal. With each case she solves, it heals a piece of her. And as we see that healing happen, the clarity [that] maybe there is a line in the sand that [she's] not supposed to cross starts to take root in her. So, what do you do with this dilemma if you've already crossed the line? As your healing has taken place, you're now like, "What have I done, and how do I rectify it without ripping everyone else's lives apart?"

We learn at one point that Gabi has been holding Sir captive for seven months. Realistically, how much longer can Gabi keep this secret from the rest of her team?

Okoro Carroll: Gabi has proven she could do some things that would be absolutely impossible for other people. What I will say is ["How long can I keep this up?"] is a question that haunts Gabi constantly, especially as she continues to heal both through the cases and through the family that she's built in [Gabi's crisis management firm] Mosley & Associates … and especially as that family gets tighter and tighter and [they] are opening up and being more vulnerable about all of their issues over the course of the season. Gabi's holding this big secret, and as time goes on, the reality of, "Is this something that could cost me this family I finally found?" is very real for Gabi and something that keeps her up at night.

One of the people whose life would certainly be upended by the revelation that Gabi has been in contact with Sir is Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh) — who we realize at the end of the pilot is actually Bella, the young girl who escaped and was briefly kidnapped with Gabi. In the present timeline, Gabi struggles with the reality that Lacey wants to continue working for her after she graduates from law school, when she could realistically work anywhere else — and with anyone else. In some way, they've formed a trauma bond that will never be broken. What do you think is the biggest point of contention in their relationship right now, and how are those two able to see each other differently than anybody else at M&A?

Okoro Carroll: Lacey was only kidnapped for 24 hours, but that doesn't mean that traumatic experience did not leave a lasting effect. We see in the pilot that it does — we see the locks on her doors, we see the dog. Lacey is someone who does not feel safe unless she's under a lot of security. She does not feel secure when she's alone. It's part of the reason why she always wants to be with Gabi and the group.

To Lacey, Gabi is the ultimate hero. This is a young girl who endured the unthinkable for a year and then risked her life the day Lacey was kidnapped to get her to safety. Lacey always says Gabi saved her life; Gabi would argue Lacey saved hers because it was the final kick she needed to make sure she got out of that situation and that [the same thing] didn't happen to Lacey. For Lacey, Gabi can do no wrong. And the more Lacey pours this gratitude of "None of us are worthy of you" onto her, the harder it is for Gabi.

She loves Lacey probably more than she's ever loved anyone in her life and, for that reason, feels like she needs to protect Lacey from the damage that Gabi has done, which is why she is constantly in this push and pull of, "I want Lacey with me, but the safest place for Lacey to grow up and just have a normal life is likely away from me." Lacey is also very perceptive, so the harder Gabi is trying to save Lacey, the more it starts to raise Lacey's antennae to, "What aren't I seeing? What am I not being told, and what am I missing?"

Gabi's day-to-day life isn't always consumed by this secret that could ruin everything she's built for herself; she's also forced to navigate a growing attraction to Detective Mark Trent (Brett Dalton), who acts as a kind of liaison between the DCPD and Mosley & Associates.

Okoro Carroll: Well, it's hard to get in a relationship when you've got a man chained up in your basement. [Laughs.]

Touché! We know they hooked up once before they began working together, but how does Gabi really feel about Trent?

Okoro Carroll: No matter how much of a pull Gabi might feel towards Trent, he is literally the one person that she feels she could never really reveal her true self to. Things are very black and white for Trent; he's a police officer because he believes in law and in his ability to make a difference in that institution, even with its flaws. In the same way that Lacey embodies all that is good in the world and the light in the darkness, Trent is also that person who represents the moral compass and all that could be good in an institution like the DCPD, who wants to help for the right reasons, who feels as restricted as Gabi does by some of the bureaucracy that stops them from being able to save lives.

For Gabi, even if she wanted to pull him into her world, it would be breaking the thing that so fundamentally makes him who he is and putting him in a difficult position. She would never intentionally do that to Trent. However, it's hard to keep him at bay when a) he is very helpful and b) it's either deal with him or the DCPD is going to send someone else who may not be as accommodating of Mosley & Associates' eccentric way of doing things. So it's a balance that she has to maintain that is often very hard.

I don't know if Gabi could have picked a more complicated person to have these feelings for, but that's the thing with attraction — you can't control it. And if she could, trust me, he's the last person she would want to be doing the "will-they-won't-they" with, but it's something that they can't control. Because they've had a taste of their chemistry in the hookup, they also both know what [their relationship] could be. And over the course of the season, we'll see them try to let that growing attraction and chemistry not get in the way of their [shared] purpose, and both of them start to affect each other's lives to the point where it will wreak some havoc.

One defining quality of a great procedural is the ability to reveal serialized character development through the case-of-the-week format. Beyond the fact that we will get flashbacks to Gabi's year in captivity with Sir, how will the present-day cases this season reveal more about each of the characters who work at M&A?

Okoro Carroll: With each case, it's already personal for everyone at M&A, because they all have a connection to either being a missing person at one point themselves, or, in Margaret's [Kelli Williams] case, being the loved one still looking for a missing person after so many years. The chance to save someone or give someone a healing in the way that none of them have [gotten] is so important to them, so every case will in some way highlight a different member of the team's backstory.

This is a team that's very good at keeping secrets because they respect each other's trauma and, therefore, respect each other's right to reveal what they want to reveal, when they want to reveal it. Because of the nature of the cases, we're going to see specific members of the team opening up to each other more about what they endured and why they have the superpower they have. It's part of what bonds the team closer together. They'll reveal more of their secrets, their vulnerabilities, the things they think make them unlovable, and find that M&A feels pretty unshakeable.

When Laci tells Gabi that she saved every person's life who works at M&A, gave them purpose and made them a family, that is real, but that doesn't mean that family can't hurt you, and that doesn't mean that family secrets can't disrupt [your lives]. And there's always the threat of that as more and more gets revealed with each case.

But what I love so much about the cases we cover is no case is the same and no missing person is the same, and we touch on so many different communities, so many different dangers out in the world. We touch on certain groups of people that some argue, "Why are we wasting˜ resources looking for them? They put themselves in that danger." Whether it's sex workers or drug addicts or the unhoused, I wanted to make sure we touched on so many of these cases because I feel like the world could just use a really strong reminder right now that empathy and looking out for your neighbor is so important.

I feel like this is the perfect time to remind people that we need each other, that no one is perfect and everyone has flaws, and that does not make anyone's life less valuable. Unfortunately, in the news right now, we have the situation with the young Indian student who was struck and killed by a police car. To hear someone laughing about that and assigning so little value to her life, it's like, "How far have we fallen?" So if through these cases, we can even just remind one person or one or two households to do a better job of empathizing and taking care of their neighbor, and seeing the human in everyone around you and not just what their situation makes you see, then hopefully I've helped make a little bit of an improvement.

Found airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on NBC. Episodes stream the next day on Peacock.